I
was most interest to read
in The Guardian of the BBC project to make a
film about Auschwitz. Are you willing to hear also
critical voices on this historical sensitive issue?
I am prepared to bet a large sum that one of your
sources will be Prof Robert
Jan van Pelt who wrote the first excellent
book on the subject. You may not know that in his
severe Judgment*
at the end of my unsuccessful libel
action against Lipstadt & Penguin Books, at
which Pelt was a star witness, even Mr Justice
Gray remarked that he found the evidence on
Auschwitz to be of astonishingly thin quality: here
are his words (which you may not have seen reported
in the press at the time):

I have to confess that, in common I suspect with
most other people, I had supposed that the
evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the
gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling. I
have, however, set aside this preconception when
assessing the evidence adduced by the parties in
these proceedings.

And:
Vulnerable though the individual categories of
evidence may be to criticisms of the kind
mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, it
appears to me that the cumulative effect of the
documentary evidence for the genocidal operation
of gas chambers at Auschwitz is
considerable.

And:
[Irving] is right to point out that the
contemporaneous documents, such as drawings,
plans, correspondence with contractors and the
like, yield little clear evidence of the
existence of gas chambers designed to kill
humans. Such isolated references to the use of
gas as are to be found amongst these documents
can be explained by the need to fumigate clothes
so as to reduce the incidence of diseases such
as typhus. The quantities of Zyklon-B delivered
to the camp may arguably be explained by the
need to fumigate clothes and other
objects.

-- I.e., hardly the kind of evidence that would
hang a man even in the good old days. The best
evidence in my view is, in this order,

The Bletchley Park intercepts;

The (unamended) aerial photos; and

The evidence
of Kurt Aumeier, who was commandant
of Auschwitz for a while. I discovered this
evidence in the Public Record Office in June
1992, you might like to note, and have posted it
in its entirety on my website, both the
handwritten originals and transcriptions which I
commissioned.

In my view there were limited-scale gassings in
the two "Bunkers" (converted farmhouses) outside
the perimeter fence, but not at the huge
underground crematory facilities of which Pelt
waffles. (Look at his
difficulties over whether there were holes in
the roof -- to insert the cyanide -- or not).

I am, as you may know, a great fan of your
projects so far [...]. Your experts might
like to keep my huge dossier
on the Auschwitz facilities under review. Do
not fall for the over-simplified computer
reconstruction of "Krema II" which Pelt introduced
in court in the Lipstadt libel action. It is full
of errors. The building, like most other such
structures in Germany and Poland, was being readied
for use as an emergency air raid shelter (with the
usual gastight doors used in such shelters). It is
important that the BBC produces a film on which Mr
Justice Gray would not be able to pass such
equivocating comments as those cited above!

Yours sincerely,

David Irving

* You can find our printed and illustrated
version of Gray J's Judgment (with facsimiles
and photos in
pdf form, far better than the printed
Penguin version. You may also wish to use the
corrected
version of the transcripts [on our
website].